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In Rome, Do as the Yelpers Do

Monticello
Thomas Jefferson’s home Monticello, a must-see in Charlottesville

During my winter holiday in Charlottesville, every meal we enjoyed at a restaurant was at a well recommended Yelp venue. Similarly my colleague Chris Pilbeam remarked that every venue he visited on a recent trip was suggested by travelers on TripAdvisor.

I guess the old adage should be revised: When in Rome do as the Yelpers do. After all, 100 million other people are using Yelp, too, and it ranks as a top 40 U.S. website according to Comscore.

All jokes aside, local search marketing now extends well beyond traditional SEO mainstays Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

If you have local business getting reviewed on Foursquare, Yelp!, TripAdvisor, Google+ Local, and perhaps Facebook’s new Nearby service is critical to your success.
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Improve Social Search

GoogleLakers

When you see a strong, social visual interface like Pinterest or Instagram, or even the revitalized Facebook and YouTube interfaces, you realize how far social search has to come. Search engines are generally not visual, don’t port well for sharing to networks, and are closed to commenting.

Google, Bing and Yahoo! index a blend of news and social conversations, but this early concept of social search is pretty stale.

The content presentation and simple link interaction is very 1.0 with text links, and a complete lack of dynamic commenting and sharing.

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Coping with the Klout Reality

Lost
Image by cintamamat

Marketers and individuals will have to deal with social scoring in the form of Klout and its sister technologies.

As time progresses, technologies and alliances evolve. I haven’t written about Klout outside of general discussions on social scoring for a good long while.

There wasn’t much to say. I agreed in principal with many of my colleagues and their continuing coverage about the broken nature of influence metrics.

But I had a second reason: As a professional communicator, it’s become increasingly clear that we won’t escape Klout, Kred and PeerIndex.

The business marketplace cannot help itself. It will chase quick fixes to community building, recruitment and measuring individual online capabilities, making social scoring an obvious play. I have three reasons for coming to this conclusion.
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Vanessa Fox Discusses Search, Siri and Social

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Meet Vanessa Fox, one of the most brilliant minds in the interactive marketing space. I was first introduced to her at an event a couple of years ago here in DC.

In addition to running her own interactive agency Nine By Blue, Vanessa literally created Google’s portal for site owners, Webmaster Central. She just released the second edition of her book, Marketing in the Age of Google, one of the best resources you can buy to understand how search impacts business outcomes, as well as content creation and social media marketing.

Rather than wax poetic about Vanessa’s strengths, I asked her some questions about voice search, semantic data, social networking and more. Her answers are just amazing. And with that, here we go…

Will Voice Search Change Everything?

Geoff: How big of a disruptor does voice based search represent?

Vanessa: For the near term, voice search will likely not be all that disruptive but we’re in early days. The biggest initial change will likely be for searchers.
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